A Solution in Search of a Problem
Written by Nick Caraway –
JJ ran her post last week on the legislative agenda for the new year and the HUGE issue that is voter fraud. I decided to do some data diving and decided to look up fraud cases in Texas the last ten years. I will include the two she referenced for 2020 and give you the other year tallies according to the Heritage Foundation.
2019– 1
2018– 8
2017– 6
2016– 2
2015– 9
2014–4
2013– 8
2012– 8
2011– 4
2010– 11
I could do the research, but let’s ballpark this. In presidential elections, between seven million and ten million Texans will cast ballots. So, in 2012, 2016, and 2020 we could put in a reasonable guess of 25 million total ballots. Let’s say that the off-year elections are at around 15 million between 2010, 2014, and 2018. That’s 40 million combined ballots and that doesn’t include the odd years when you have mayor elections, city council elections, and school board elections. Maybe that’s a total of 5 million votes cast. So, we will estimate a total of 45 million votes cast between 2010 and 2020. I might even be lowballing it there.
So, if we add the total cases of documented fraud we get a grand total of 63 cases since 2010. Using the trusty calculator on my phone, that ends up being .00014 percent of the ballots cast in the last ten years. Remember, I’m lowballing the number of ballots cast in that time.
Okay, the counterargument to that is that we didn’t catch everyone. Fine. Let’s assume we only caught ten percent of those that fraudulently voted. That means that fraud impacted .0014 percent of the vote. So, after all that we are going to prioritize making our elections safe and secure? Okay, gotcha.
I hate to say it but the scare mongering works because people are generally very poor at assessing risk. They think they understand the odds when they don’t.
That’s why casinos always make money and government lottery is such a rip off and why traffic accidents are so common. And it is why “election integrity” movements get and keep traction.
To beat them down you have to come up with convincing marketing that reaches the “common clay.” I don’t know what that would be but it would have to be something like “You are xxx times more likely to yyy than you are going to get away with steal a vote in Texas.”
I dunno what yyy would be. Something to do with possums or armadillo I guess.
1Not to flog it or anything, but if it is bipartisan cheating, then the NET partisan fraudulent votes that could actually affect the election is even less.
2This has never been about fraud. It has always been about suppressing the vote, particularly these days when more people voting means more Democrats elected. It really is just that simple.
3Based on the lawsuits filed on trumpf’s behalf and thrown out by courts across the country, these stats are right in line nationally. Of course as we know, the truth is no obstacle to repugnanticans, so the R faithful believe the rhetoric state gop’s regurgitate in support of voter suppression laws.
4Voter suppression started with the Constitution, by denying the right to 100% of woman, Black, and Native people. As a nation we’ve required multiple Constitutional amendments, plus state and federal laws so the origional error could be corrected. The laws are better than when we started and could be better still, but there are always some who block further progress and would rather take us back decades if not centuries.
One book I’m currently reading is ‘American Violence’ by Richard Hofstadter. Many examples of mob incited lawlessness and vigilantism cited from over the last 300 years are sadly voter suppression related.
5Whatever the numbers, in all the states that have carried out audits or done recounts, there have been few which reversed or invalidated outcomes.
Brennan Center considered the 2020 election, specifically.
6“By all measures, the 2020 general election was one of the most secure elections in our history. Voters turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots by mail and in person, and the votes were counted in a timely manner. This success, however, did not dissuade President Trump and his enablers from loudly claiming fraud when the race did not go his way. In a brazen attempt to overturn the results, he unleashed an onslaught of outlandish claims about widespread fraud in the election, shamelessly targeting the votes of Black and Latino citizens in several cities. The severity of the allegations by the president and his allies, however false, has elicited a resounding rebuke of the myth of widespread voter fraud from officials at every level of government. And today, the Supreme Court all but ended the legal fight to overturn the election when it rejected Texas’s lawsuit to throw out the presidential election results in four battleground states that President Trump lost.”
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/its-official-election-was-secure
The NSGOP goons in the legislature know exactly what the problem is, and it ain’t election integrity. It’s just the lie they tell to convince the Screwy Louie voters that it needs doing. Our problem is that we have too many Screwy Louie voters, from one end of Texas to the other, who have lost (or never had) the ability to focus on what really matters.
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2021/03/28
7HR-1 has passed the House and the Senate’s version has been introduced. Koch and other dark money wingnuts did some polling and focus groups on it and were scared because conservative voters love the idea of clean and transparent elections.
Conservatives are terrified of George Soros. He’s their biggest boogeyman since Obama is no longer president.
Someone needs to label HR-1 as the bill to keep Mr Soros from messing with our elections. (He doesn’t, but scares the dickens out of conservatives.)
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